American Ingenuity and Pragmatism – The Wright Brothers

For a change of pace from the constant drum beat of politics by Twitter and the soul-searching fiction I usually read, I needed a non-fiction reminder of what made this country so unique and special.  Toward that end, I turned to David McCullough and his biography, The Wright Brothers.  McCullough has the ability to present history as a living entity, a time machine into the past.  Once you read something by him, you feel connected to that era.  I read his award-winning 1776 and John Adams before I started writing this blog and later returned to his The Great Bridge which he wrote early in his career.  It is the story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and as Brooklyn is near and dear to my heart, I marveled at his tale.

He is a natural born writer and honed his craft as an English major at Yale University.  He is not an historian by education, but historical literature is nothing more than great story telling using facts where possible and filling in the blanks.  I’ve always found that the line between fiction and non-fiction is very malleable.  Being a good writer brings history to life.

In The Wright Brothers he captures the persona of two distinctly American men, Wilbur and Orville Wright, problem solvers and entrepreneurs who after establishing a successful bicycle manufacturing business in Dayton, Ohio around the turn of the century became fascinated by flight, studying birds for their beginning education in aerodynamics.  Against the then current belief that human flight (other than by balloon) is impossible, and without funding, they methodically and pragmatically tinkered with glider design, picking the Outer Banks -- Kitty Hawk, NC -- as their testing site, not exactly around the corner from Toledo, Ohio, because of the unrelenting winds there.  It was completely desolated during those times and at first they lived in tents, graduating to a little shop they set up.  Not many people followed them, thinking they were just eccentric.

Having access to the extensive Wright Family papers allowed McCullough to tap into primary source documentation, quoting sometimes from these to tell the story.  Imagine Wilbur setting up camp, awaiting the arrival of Orville, writing a letter to his father which so clearly sets out the methodical thinking behind their experiments with flight:

I have my machine nearly finished. It is not to have a motor and is not expected to fly in any true sense of the word. My idea is merely to experiment and practice with a view to solving the problem of equilibrium. I have plans which I hope to find much in advance of the methods tried by previous experimenters. When once a machine is under proper control under all conditions, the motor problem will be quickly solved. A failure of a motor will then mean simply a slow descent and safe landing instead of a disastrous fall.

This was the genius behind the Wright Brothers experiments, start with the obvious, recognizing that like a bicycle, lack of control will defeat this mode of transportation.  Well funded experiments such as those conducted by Samuel Langley, with a machine called “The Great Aerodrome” which had the backing of $50,000 in public money from the U.S. War Department and another $20,000 in private backing, including an investment by Alexander Graham Bell, was doomed to crash.  Contrast that to the total of $1,000 the Wright Brothers invested in their successful experiment and you have yet another example of private pragmatism triumphing over public profligacy.

Much of their work was done almost secretly, which is the way Wilbur and Orville wanted it, eschewing publicity and crowds until, well, their experiments resulted in a real flying machine.  In fact they had to take it to Europe to make their mark publicly.  That is an interesting story onto itself, particularly given the fact that the European chapter in their lives involved not only them, but their sister Katherine as well.  She became increasingly involved with their work after Orville was seriously hurt (but fully recuperated with her help) after their one serious accident.  They knew the work was dangerous and for that reason they had a cardinal rule never to fly together (their next generation of the “Wright Flyer” was outfitted for two people), a practice they dutifully followed until later in Wilbur’s life when flying was more commonplace.

While inspiration and perspiration were in large part the necessary ingredients in their ultimate success, so was fortuity.  The unsung hero which McCullough cites in his story is Charlie Parker, an itinerant mechanic who the brothers occasionally used for making parts for their bicycles, who was finally hired full time.  As he later recalled:  They offered me $18 a week…..that was pretty good money…Besides, I liked the Wrights….So far as I can figure out, Will and Orv hired me to worry about the bicycle business so they could concentrate on their flying studies and experiments…And I must have satisfied them for they didn’t hire anyone else for eight years.

Indeed, Parker ran the business while the brothers were working on their experiments, but that was just a small part of Parker’s contribution to solving the riddle of powered flights.  When the brothers finally felt they licked the problem of controlled glider flight, they were ready to add an engine for powered flight.  Accordingly, they asked various automobile manufactures to submit specifications for a light engine with sufficient power but received only one reply and that engine was too heavy.  They themselves had insufficient knowledge to build such an engine but happenstance there was Charlie Parker, a brilliant mechanic.  As he later recalled and recounted by McCullough:  While the boys were handy with tools, they had never done much machine-work and anyway they were busy on the air frame.  It was up to me….We didn’t make any drawings.  One of us would sketch out the part we were talking about on a piece of scratch paper and I’d spike the sketch over my bench.

Does it get any more seat of the pants than that?  He later finished a four cylinder engine, “with a 4-inch bore and a 4-inch stroke.  It was intended to deliver 8 horsepower and weigh no more than 200 pounds, to carry a total of 675 pounds, the estimated combined weight of the flying machine and an operator.  As it turned out, the motor Charlie built weighed only 152 pounds, for the reason that the engine block was of cast aluminum provided by the up-and-coming Aluminum Company of America based in Pittsburgh.  Other materials came from Dayton manufacturers and suppliers, but the work of boring out the cast iron for the independent cylinders and making the cast iron piston rings was all done by one man with a drooping walrus mustache working in the back room at the bicycle shop.” 

 

The brothers led a monastic life, totally dedicated to their work.  They were bachelors and except for strict observance of the Sunday Sabbath, it was work 24 x 7.  All that sacrifice and McCullough movingly recounts the moment in time when they alternatively flew the first four successful times, the last by Wilbur, 852 feet in 59 seconds.  “It had taken four years. They had endured violent storms, accidents, one disappointment after another, public indifference or ridicule, and clouds of demon mosquitoes. To get to and from their remote sand dune testing ground they had made five round-trips from Dayton (counting Orville's return home to see about stronger propeller shafts), a total of seven thousand miles by train, all to fly little more than half a mile. No matter. They had done it.”

After that their life changed, becoming celebrities of sorts, but still focusing on their work for the next several years, better known in Europe than here in many ways as they went to France to demonstrate their work to the government who had more interest at the time than their own.  Wilbur was the first to go abroad.  His time there was unlike any he’d known back in Dayton, beginning with his first transatlantic voyage on the Cunard Line’s Campania which was advertised as “a flying palace of the ocean,” a phrase which of course appealed to Wilbur.  We made 466 miles the first day he wrote back home and he took a tour of the engine room, amazed at those engines delivering 28,000 horsepower vs. the 25 of the new engine for the Flyer III he was about to demonstrate across Europe. He took copious notes during the crossing and walked its decks to the tune of 5 to 10 miles a day. Wilbur was a person of contemplation and action.

One would think this methodical, technical man might not appreciate all that Paris could offer but he became a regular visitor to the Louvre and spent countless hours among its masterpieces.  Ultimately Orville and Katherine joined him and they became the toast of France, Wilbur at first.  “As said by the Paris correspondent for the Washington Post, it was not just his feats in the air that aroused such interest but his strong ‘individuality.’ He was seen as a personification of ‘the Plymouth Rock spirit,’ to which French students of the United States, from the time of Alexis de Tocqueville, had attributed ‘the grit and indomitable perseverance that characterize American efforts in every department of activity.’”

I think that observation is the essence of McCullough’s biography about the two brothers, their pragmatic approach to problem solving and faith in doing what no one thought possible.  They were finally recognized back home at the White House, President Taft himself presenting medals and acknowledging the tardiness of their recognition at home and the accomplishment which given their lack of support is uniquely American, diligence prevailing above all:

I esteem it a great honor and an opportunity to present these medals to you as an evidence of what you have done. I am so glad-perhaps at a delayed hour-to show that in America it is not true that "a prophet is not without honor save in his own country." It is especially gratifying thus to note a great step in human discovery by paying honor to men who bear it so modestly. You made this discovery by a course that we of America like to feel is distinctly American-by keeping your noses right at the job until you had accomplished what you had determined to do.

This recognition was finally followed by the largest celebration ever staged in their home town of Dayton, Ohio.  It is mind boggling to think that the invention of flight was only little more than 100 years ago.  It demonstrates the rapidity of change today.

Reading this masterful biography was the perfect antidote to a disheartening election and now post election season, with its invective rhetoric, a display of American unexceptionalism and gullibility.   One can only hope this too shall pass and we will revert to the mean that made this nation so special, as typified by the Wright Brothers and so brilliantly portrayed by David McCullough. 

While I was writing this, the report came in that the Wright brothers’ fellow Ohioan, John Glenn, died at the age of 95, the last surviving member of the Mercury Seven.  I remember watching Glenn’s launch on a small B&W TV with my college classmates in our dormitory.  We were in awe of his bravery and felt particularly proud to be an American on that day in 1962.  He and his fellow Mercury 7 astronauts were immortalized by Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff.  The Wright brothers had the right stuff too and Glenn had already flown as a WW II combat pilot while Orville was still alive.  The Wright Brothers and John Glenn:  Ohioans, pioneers, pilots, uniquely American. 

 I was not able to attend the ticket tape parade for Glenn and the Mercury 7 astronauts as I was in class on that March day in 1962.  But Tom Wolfe captured its mood; the Wright Brothers were certainly there in spirit: “They anointed them with the primordial tears that the right stuff commanded….Somehow, extraordinary as it was, it was…right!  The way it should be!  The unutterable aura of the right stuff had been brought onto the terrain where things were happening!  Perhaps that was what New York existed for, to celebrate those who had it, whatever it was, and there was nothing like the right stuff, for all responded to it, and all wanted to be near it and to feel the sizzle and to blink in the light…Oh, it was a primitive and profound thing!  Only pilots truly had it, but the entire world responded, and no one knew its name!”

TRU – A Poignant “Holiday Play” at Dramaworks

While he dishes the dirt with the audience, ‘Tru’ as Truman Capote was nicknamed as a youth, is inherently alone on stage.  Alone.  That’s the essential message from Jay Presson Allen's play, which takes place during one holiday season (circa 1975), a time when his expectation of joy is displaced by a sense of estrangement from many of his closest friends.  The play examines the place of the artist in society, drawn from the very words and works of Truman Capote.  Dramaworks’ lapidary craftsmanship and Ron Donohoe’s bravura performance make this a compelling production.

Capote is a flamboyant and proud homosexual, a person of acerbic wit with that lisp and unmistakable southern drawl, and that is part of the charm of this play.  But Tru is also an author’s author, as a sensitive boy drawn to writing, later launching a career predominately as a writer of short stories.  However, his two best remembered works are his novella of a writer coming of age in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (unlike the focus of the movie), and In Cold Blood, where he skillfully demonstrated his striking ability as a non-fiction journalist, written with the eye of a novelist. 

Rob Donohoe’s outstanding performance as an openly gay man is not an impersonation but a tribute.  Donohoe is a Dramaworks veteran, having played a wide range of parts.  Before Dramaworks’ Producing Artistic Director Bill Hayes finalized arrangements for producing Tru this season, he wanted a commitment from Donohoe to play the part.  That was a year ago and Donohoe has since immersed himself in Capote’s work and life story, going to a voice coach to capture the high, nasal, southern accent of Capote and then modulating it for the stage. 

Capote’s angst becomes palpable as we first see him unraveling the day before Christmas Eve.  Thanks to a recent publication in Esquire of a part of his unfinished novel Answered Prayers, in which he unflinchingly reveals unflattering portraits of his “friends”, the super wealthy, idle rich, he has now been summarily abandoned by them, and most depressingly by his high society women friends with whom he shares a gossipy codependence.  This is a very harsh blow.  But here Tru responds to his critics, ”Answered Prayers is the book I’ve been in training for my whole life…...I’ve written a lot of books, but basically I’ve always had this one book to justify..…everything.  What’s it about?  Answered Prayers is about them.  The Super Rich.  As seen through the eyes of an outsider who for various reasons has privileged access.  Hehehe.  It’s about sexual license and ethical squalor.”

The artist’s relationship to the wealthy is frequently a symbiotic one, the artist needing financial support while the uber rich need something to fill their relatively empty lives.  Tru feels this deeply, saying, “Money, money, money!  They’re very nervous with you if you think you don’t have any.  That’s why they hang together so desperately.  It’s not that they like each other…they don’t.  A yacht and five houses are what they have in common.  And they get very bored with each other.  So when they can, they try to take in amusing artists.” 

So it is with some bewilderment that Tru is facing the holidays, wondering what in the world did they think he was doing with them, other than entertaining them; after all he is a writer and to him Answered Prayers is the culmination of his life’s work.  And as we learn, he has known EVEYONE in society.  If they’ve ever been to Studio 54 they were under his scrutiny.  He proudly states:  “I am an artist.  Artists belong to no class.  And people like that who cozy up to artists do so at their own risk.” Nonetheless, this work becomes a path to self destruction, lubricated by alcohol and pills.

 

Conflicting Christmas emotions set the tone for the entire production.  On the one hand he has fond Christmas memories, particularly of “Sook” who was his mother’s oldest sister, a person some people considered retarded, and thus people thought her “funny.” “Sookie and I were like forgotten people.  Sook by her brothers and sisters and me by my parents.”  These two misfits were close, particularly around the holidays, when they made fruit cakes together.  His book Christmas Memory provides some of the narrative about their distinctive relationship.  Nonetheless, Capote confesses -- and this is the essential sadness of this “Christmas play” -- “I’m very ambivalent about Christmas.  I want it to be magic – warm and lavish with all your friends like a family.  Which sets up terrible anxiety because I don’t have a very good history with Christmases.  And that’s true with alcoholics, you know.”

Yet, in spite of the bravado, the cutting wit, and drunken cynicism, there is vulnerability about Rob Donohoe’s performance, one we all have about our lives, whether we are “liked,” and essentially the meaning of our existence, and the choices we have made, which brings Capote to this moment in time.  For much of Capote’s life he was a pop culture figure, ”famous for being famous,” but Rob Donohoe delves into that other place where the artist and the true human being reside.  Although there is a sense of sadness and resignation it is not all gloom and doom as the play provides for plenty of laughs, such as when Tru receives “a veritable horse trough of unspeakable poinsettias..…[which] are the Bob Goulet of Botany.”

One person plays are not everyone’s cup of tea, yet in many ways they are harder to produce than conventional plays and therefore more challenging to the small team of actor, director, and technical staff.  Tru is skillfully directed by Lynnette Barkley, her third directorial stint at Dramaworks, and working closely with Paul Black, the scenic and lighting designer, they created other “characters” using the set --the bar, the Christmas tree, and the piano, points which relate to Capote’s life and help create movement and modulate the mood as Tru moves from his highs to lows. 

The set is gloriously breathtaking, capturing a sense of Capote’s UN Plaza apartment, with its books, framed black and white photos on the wall of Capote and friends, ubiquitous parquet floors and view of NYC.  You are a visitor in Capote’s home and get to know the man and all the different layers of his life through his interaction with his environment.  This is the magic of a one person play: you are in a one to one relationship with the character.  This person is talking to you, even breaking the fourth wall at times, which can’t help but create a special sense of intimacy.

Costume design is by Brian O'Keefe, and although only one person is on stage, he needed clothes that would enable him to perform the part believably, not to mention making him look shorter and heavier than Donohoe is himself.  Sound design by Brad Pawlak captures voice overs from the answering machine, from Tru’s memory, and an interesting musical selection Allen’s play requires, concluding with the haunting lyrics of “Little Drummer Boy”.

I played my drum for Him pa rum pum pum pum.

I played my best for Him Pa rum pum pum pum

Then He smiled at me pa rum pum pum pum;

Me and my drum.

Tru is a little gem of a theatre piece.

A Sport and a Pastime; A James Salter Masterpiece

Salter chisels precise sentences, ones Hemingway himself would envy.  And there are flashes of Fitzgerald as well, colorful and lyrical.  It’s long been said that Salter is a writer’s writer and in A Sport and a Pastime (“Remember that the life of this world is but a sport and a pastime…” from The Koran) he spins the tale of three people, one the narrator, and then the story of the 24 year old Philip Dean and his young lover, an 18 year old French shop girl, Anne-Marie.  We follow their pleasures of eating, abandoned sex, motoring about the French countryside, from hotel to hotel and restaurant to restaurant, all related through the imagination and recollection of our voyeur narrator.  Sexually, every major position from the Kama Sutra is explicitly explored and yet the novel is not pornographic, Salter weaving eroticism into his panoply of French provincial images and the strange relationship of the narrator to the two main characters.

The narrator warns the reader that his tale is as much fabricated as it is real.  What is real and imagined is left to the reader.  We know little about the unnamed narrator who is staying at his friends’ country home in Autun, France (the Wheatlands, who live in Paris) as he has done many times before.  It is here that he befriends Dean.  He is fond of the French countryside and he imagines a love interest in a woman there, Claude, who he only glimpses from afar.  He fantasizes about her and here is the genius of Salter who skillfully foreshadows the narrator’s interest in Dean and Anne-Marie.  Salter’s writing is exquisite:

I have discarded my identity. I am still at large, free of my old self until the first encounters, and now I imagine, very clearly, meeting Claude Picquet. For a moment I have the sure premonition I am about to, that I am really going to see her at the next corner and, made confident by the cognacs, begin quite naturally to talk. We walk along together. I watch her closely as she speaks. I can tell she is interested in me, I am circling her like a shark. Suddenly I realize: it will be her. Yes, I'm sure of it. I'm going to meet her. Of course, I'm a little drunk, a little reckless, and in an amiable condition that lets me see myself destined as her lover, cutting into her life with perfect ease. I've noticed you passing in the street many times, I tell her. Yes? She pretends that surprises her. Do you know the Wheatlands, I ask. The Wheatlands? Monsieur and Madame Wheatland, I say. Ah, oui. Well, I tell her, I'm staying in their house. What comes next? I don't know-it will be easy once I am actually talking to her. I want her to come and see it, of course. I want to hear the door close behind her. She stands over by the window. She's not afraid to turn her back to me, to let me move close. I am going to just touch her lightly on the arm … Claude … She looks at me and smiles.

Ultimately, his inner life becomes consumed by his thoughts and observations of Dean and Anne-Marie, Salter making the point that memory is not a photograph but a construct:

Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by time, like coins in the pocket of a forgotten suit. Most of the details, though, have long since been transformed or rearranged to bring others of them forward. Some, in fact, are obviously counterfeit; they are no less important. One alters the past to form the future. But there is a real significance to the pattern which finally appears, which resists all further change. In fact, there is the danger that if I continue to try, the whole concert of events will begin to fall apart in my hands like old newspaper, I can't bear to think of that. The myriad past, it enters us and disappears. Except that within it, somewhere, like diamonds, exist the fragments that refuse to be consumed. Sifting through, if one dares, and collecting them, one discovers the true design.

The narrator is awed by Dean, knowing he can never experience his ease in matters of love and profligacy:

I am only the servant of life. He is an inhabitant. And above all, I cannot confront him. I cannot even imagine such a thing. The reason is simple: I am afraid of him, of all men who are successful in love. That is the source of his power.

This is eerily similar in its conceit to Salter’s last novel, All that Is. Its main character, Bowman, tries to imagine the sexual life of a person he once admired, Kimmel, and goes on to try to recreate that life for himself. 

Dean subsists on money from his father.  He is a Yale drop out.  He knows that it will end but meanwhile this intense relationship with Ann-Marie blocks out all light about choices and planning for the future.  Dean is a blind man to it all.  Is it no wonder our narrator ruminates:

Now, at twenty-four, he has come to the time of choice. I know quite well how all that is. And then, I read his letters. His father writes to him in the most beautiful, educated hand, the born hand of a copyist. Admonitions to confront life, to think a little more seriously about this or that. I could have laughed. Words that meant nothing to him. He has already set out on a dazzling voyage which is more like an illness, becoming ever more distant, more legendary. His life will be filled with those daring impulses which cause him to disappear and next be heard of in Dublin, in Veracruz… I am not telling the truth about Dean, I am inventing him. I am creating him out of my own inadequacies, you must always remember that.

After a while, the second phase begins: the time of few choices. Uncertainties, strange fears of the past. Finally, of course, comes the third phase, the closing, and one must begin shutting out the world as if by panels because the strength to consider everything in all its shattering diversity is gone and the shape of life-but he will be in a poet's grave by then-finally appears, like a drop about to fall.

Dean doesn't quite understand this yet. It doesn't mean anything in particular to him. He is, after all, not discontented. Her breasts are hard. Her cunt is sopping. He fucks her gracefully, impelled by pure joy. He arches up to see her and to look at his prick plunging in, his balls tight beneath it. Mythology has accepted him, images he cannot really believe in, images brief as dreams. The sweat rolls down his arms. He tumbles into the damp leaves of love, he rises clean as air. There is nothing about her he does not adore. When they are finished, she lies quiet and limp, exhausted by it all. She has become entirely his, and they lie like drunkards, their bare limbs crossed. In the cold distance the bells begin, filling the darkness, clear as psalms.

We all know how this must end, much like Dean’s rare sports car, a Delage, one he abandons, which immediately atrophies with Dean’s departure.  I think of Dean as a Gatsby and the narrator as his Nick Carraway.  Perhaps this is intended all along by Salter, his hat tip to Fitzgerald…

We are all at his mercy. We are subject to his friendship, his love. It is the principles of his world to which we respond, which we seek to find in ourselves. It is his power which I cannot even identify, which is flickering, sometimes present and sometimes not – without it he is empty, a body without breath, as ordinary as my own reflection in the mirror – it is this power which guarantees his existence, even afterwards, even when he is gone.

Although Salter wrote six novels as well as a number of screenplays, A Sport and a Pastime, Light Years, and All that Is are probably his finest.  All that Is was published only two years before his death at the age of 90. His first novel, which I have on my shelf to read is considered a masterpiece of war-time aviation fiction, The Hunters published in 1956 (Salter was a West Point graduate and a jet pilot during the Korean conflict, a remarkable background for a writer of his stature).  That is a span of 57 years during which he wrote his few novels.  His output was not great, but his writing is.

William Trevor, a Writer for the Ages

William Trevor has died at the age of 88. I came to William Trevor’s masterful short stories late in life as American fiction has been my literary bailiwick.  Trevor was an Irishman who lived mostly in England as an adult.  My loss not having followed him all that time, but I made up for it reading his two massive collections of short stories. I was astounded by his genius.  In his passing, I feel as if a close friend has died, intimately knowing him by his love of, and his sadness for, his characters.  Nonetheless, he was but an observer… By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people.

The Guardian obituary says it all about his life and fiction, justifiably declaring he was “one of the greatest short story writers of the last century.”  He also wrote 20 novels, an incredible output for a writer who mostly flew under the literary world’s radar screen, which suited him just fine. As a writer one doesn’t belong anywhere. Fiction writers, I think, are even more outside the pale, necessarily on the edge of society. Because society and people are our meat, one really doesn’t belong in the midst of society. The great challenge in writing is always to find the universal in the local, the parochial. And to do that, one needs distance.

While in my entries on Trevor I mentioned a few of his short stories, to describe them in detail is to retell his tales, so I tried to simply sum them up as follows:

“Here are widows and widowers, miscreants and innocents, the travails of the elderly juxtaposed to the innocence of youth, the dilemmas of the middle aged and the divorced, so often lonely people trying to connect with someone who is inappropriate, and people from all economic stations of life. His characters are victims of their own actions, sometimes ‘imagining’ (the number of times Trevor says, ‘he [or] she imagined’ is countless) different outcomes and different realities.  There is a Pinteresque quality to many of the stories, showing humanity, some humor, and a hint of the absurd.

We identify with his characters, perhaps their taking the wrong fork in the road as we might be prone to do, and the consequences of their actions.  He spotlights that inherent loneliness we sometimes feel at social gatherings, or in our everyday relationships.  The mistakes of our lives add up but so do our little victories, our justifications of our actions making things seem alright.” 

With the passing of Trevor, along with Updike and Cheever, our best short story writers have been silenced, but their literature lives.